


for having loved a little while

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, sacrifice ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-16 00:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11242905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Robin does what she must, and Frederick picks up the pieces.





	for having loved a little while

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pomme (manta)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manta/gifts).



> For dearest Winny, ever-faithful companion in crying. 
> 
> Prompt: "things you said under the stars and in the grass."
> 
> Title from "Hello My Old Heart" by The Oh Hello's, which is my ultimate half-of-OTP-is-dead-or-otherwise-vanished-indefinitely song and was basically on loop while I was writing this.
> 
> I have a lot of Fredrobin feels but the most potent and painful feel of all is that Frederick would let Robin go because he knows a thing or two about Doing Your Duty.

On a good day, the memories only come back half as frequently.

_“Good night. Wake me when you want me to take the watch, Chrom.”_

_She lies down on the ground close to the fire like it’s nothing, without stopping even to let down her hair, arms folded beneath her head and the pebble-riddled earth at her back as she turns her face up to the sky. Frederick watches her cautiously out of the corner of one eye, but when she closes her eyes they stay closed, and the sword laid out at her side, too, stays where it is, just within reach of her hand._

_The only thing that changes as he watches is the way she breathes; it slows and deepens, the rise and fall of it a sure sign of clean, true sleep. As though she truly is at rest, safe and at home—and he, whose eyes dart back and forth at every shadow, can hardly believe it._

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she is with him as soon as he wakes up—still always before dawn, still always ahead of everyone he’s promised to protect. Sometimes she drifts into his thoughts just as he closes his eyes to sleep, like a vision, or a spell, and he cannot get away from her then.

_“Are you going back out?” she asks, when she finds him saddling up Archer. The evening has deepened and the torches have just been lit; everyone else is at supper in the mess tents, all the other horses tethered. “I’d like to come with you, if you don’t mind.”_

_“Milady should be at supper.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, thankful that at least his hands are preoccupied with straps and buckles. He doesn’t mind, exactly—not the same way he would have months ago—but he doesn’t know how to say that being alone with her unsettles him. She always looks at him too long, and too penetratingly, like he’s a book in some arcane language she’s only begun studying how to decipher._

_“So should milord, I would think.”_

_“It would be remiss to sit down for a meal before securing the perimeter a second time. I had meant to eat upon returning, afterwards.”_

_“Well, then, so will I. I’m sure there’ll be enough bread and stew left for the two of us, unless the men go for second helpings.” She also smiles too much, in this strange, secret way she has that tells him she knows things. “We’ll just have to make this quick.”_

Sometimes he repeats her words back to himself, in a whisper, embarrassed by the seeming childishness of it and afraid that someone will hear him through the stones of the castle. Sometimes he talks to her, there in the darkness, but he hates too much the way his voice shakes when he tries, and silences himself by grinding his teeth together until his head aches.

 

* * *

 

_He has always ridden out for the night patrol; naturally this is the first of many aspects of his routine to be overturned by her sudden presence. It doesn’t matter how much she insists that nothing needs to change—that he can continue to ride, and she’ll be perfectly happy to walk._

_“I’m not some princess who needs to be led along on a palfrey,” she protests, when he broaches the possibility of_ her _riding, and_ him _walking alongside with a leading rein. “I’m telling you, you can ride, it doesn’t matter.”_

 _“It_ does _matter.”_

_He cannot help chafing at being argued with, and at the stony silence that falls between them afterward, delaying their departure even further. It’s a silence that stretches on as the moon climbs, broken only by Archer, still tied to the fence, snuffling restlessly under his hand. Then by the fence itself, creaking as Robin pushes off from where she’s been leaning against it._

_“Let’s walk together, then.” This in the tactician’s voice, the wise voice, the voice that brooks no argument. Frederick rides into battle to the sound of that voice every day; he’s gotten used to trusting his life to it, even if it flies in the face of all his earlier doubts. It would be wrong to do otherwise, now. “Archer, too. We’ll all carry ourselves, since you’re so finicky.”_

_He manages only this feeble defense as he draws up by her side, leading Archer on his left, ignoring the way the horse’s ears twitch and his eyes fix on the two of them with what appears to be a bemused expression: “I am_ not _finicky.”_

_“Now you just sound like Lissa,” she says, and laughs._

 

* * *

He still goes out on his patrols every day, riding as far as the first village on the outskirts of Ylisstol, once in a while even as far as the second.

He has always valued vigilance above all else, as far as vigilance goes in these times. And the questions only surface on days that are so quiet he allows himself to wonder just what, exactly, he is watching for so persistently, just behind the next tree, around the next bend in the road—

 

* * *

 

_Her right hand is armored with calluses along the top of the palm, just beneath the fingers, from the ridged handle of her sword. The left is so scorched by magic that the skin has gone white and webbed and stretched across the bone—commonplace enough for mages, he knows, but the smoothness of her scars when he cradles that hand in his own, the unexpected, even coolness of her skin, are like nothing else he’s ever touched._

_“I would be honored if you wore it.” The ring, too, is cool in his free hand, though growing warmer with every heartbeat, the thin silver circle tattooing its outline into his palm as he clutches it close. “Will you?”_

_She says “no” with such a straight face that his heart drops straight into the pit of his stomach, but she doesn’t give him time to protest her refusal, either. Before he can so much as open his mouth he feels her hands, her rough, searching fingers, glide through his hair—her arms around his neck as she rises up on tiptoe, her lips on his cheeks and eyelids and the bridge of his nose, her breath warm with laughter gusting out over his face._

_“I will, I will. Silly man, of course I will.”_

_He nearly drops the ring when his arms lock around her waist and lift her off her feet, only just remembers which fist to keep closed. He contemplates, briefly, spinning her around in a circle—as lovers do in those books Sumia’s always trying to lend him—but he realizes just in time that he’s too busy kissing her back._

 

* * *

 

She never did go back to camp when he told her to. She never did allow herself a full night’s sleep.

These are the least of the things he could be angry with her for, but they are the only ones that don’t gut him to think of, smiling to himself as he tries to count all the patrols she insisted on joining him on. He had never needed a companion to keep watch with. He had been keeping watch just like this for years, alone but for the grass and the stars and the stones in his pocket clacking softly one against the other with every step.

“You might let Stahl ride out in the evening now and again,” Chrom hazards one day, careful with his speech as Frederick’s never known him to be. Stepping lightly, every word made of glass, too close to shattering. “Or Sully. Get some rest for once.”

(The answer is always no, will always be no—they both know it, as they both know that Chrom has a halidom to rule and has long since ceded leadership of the Shepherds, but Frederick remains grateful for the asking all the same.)

 

* * *

 

_“The dragon and I are one and the same. If we do manage to hold out against Grima, he might yet die if I’m the one who strikes the final blow.” Her voice is quiet, steady as it always is discussing strategy, but he doesn’t miss the trembling in her hands where they lie folded above her ribcage, or the resolute way she fixes her eyes on the stars overhead and will not turn to face him. “But Chrom will be very angry with me, I expect.”_

_Tonight as they neared the end of the evening watch Robin had unbuckled the bridle from around Archer’s head and turned him loose in the shadow of Mount Prism, had then taken Frederick by the arm and pulled him down with her onto the grass. Before this, they had been naming the stars, so fixed and so sure in their places it’s almost as though they tracked the army’s passage from Ylisse, here to what feels like the edge of the world. The Crown, the Arrowhead. The Seven Sisters, low on the horizon. Right above them, marking the true North, the Rose of the Winds._

_Frederick knows that at first light tomorrow they depart to meet the Fell Dragon at Origin Peak in the west—to come at last to the end of this long tale, whatever that might mean. More than an hour now they’ve been lying side by side on the ground like this; it must be close to midnight, too late by far to be anywhere but in their tent getting ready to face the morning, and yet he finds he cannot move, however he might try._

_“Only because losing you will cut him deep,” he says. He can already imagine what Chrom will think of this plan of hers—can picture the rage, the denial. Chrom cannot be anything other than what he is, and so would fight to keep her, would die before he let her go. “You are the truest friend he has.”_

_“I know.” The words are soft with pain; Robin closes her eyes as they leave her. Frederick feels her steel herself with every indrawn breath, channeling all her willpower down to the bones of her fingers, the soles of her feet._

_He says nothing, only listens to her, and to the wind as it whispers through the grass (soft and green, he thinks, and growing high, so much like the grass they found her napping in, so conveniently). The blades bow and brush at his cheeks, the shells of his ears._

_She moves so quietly he almost mistakes it for the wind—that soft rustle as she shifts her weight up onto one elbow and bends forward, her hair falling all around him, the risen moon behind her casting a shadow._

_“Are_ you _angry with me, Frederick the Wary?”_

_She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t weep, either, though something sharp and fierce and fiery stands bright in her eyes and he fears that she might, for a moment. But she does not, and when he looks up at her and sees his own heart he knows there is no way forward but for the two of them to do what they must._

_Frederick knows, because all things are clearest in hindsight, that all his caution could not have possibly prepared him for what she was. For everything that Robin is, here, now._

_“I love you,” he says, and pulls her back down to him, as gently as he knows how._

 

* * *

 

“You need to sleep more. She’d be so upset with us if she could see you now.”

Sumia doesn’t say her name. They never say her name, if only because it would cut at all of them to speak it aloud and wait for her to appear. Wait for nothing, when all is said and done.

So when Sumia—or Lissa, or even Chrom himself—fusses like this all he does is smile. They worry about him every day, but he wants to think that these seasons since the war ended have done something to soften him up, make him a little less grim, a little more open-hearted. He takes the evening meal at the same time as all the others, nowadays. For that one small hour he sheds his armor, allows himself to sink into the laughter and the chatter that fills the room to the rafters—forgets, however briefly, to yearn so much—

Frederick knows he’s never been in the business of desiring things. He’s always been careful to do what is asked of him. That was before she came, before she changed it all with one deft movement of her hand. He cleans his plate with a last hunk of bread and a swallow of water, and stands to clear his place at the table—smiling, again, when Sumia wrinkles her nose.

“Going out on patrol, Captain?”

_“Again, Frederick? We’ll be safe here at least until morning, surely?”_

 

* * *

 

They—Chrom and Lissa and Sumia and the rest—mean to search for her. They believe so desperately in a return, and in a _someday_ , and like this they keep her alive.

Frederick is not so different. Frederick believes as hard as anyone, for all that he appears to do nothing. He joins the rest of the halidom in prayer on feast days, and at the turn of each season. Always hopes—however quietly, in the most secret heart of him—that maybe one day he’ll find another miracle nestled in the grass. He doesn’t know that he’s done anything to deserve a second blessing, beyond his own small part in a war that nearly ended the world, but he prays for it all the same.

And in the meantime, he saddles Archer after supper every night, and rides out of the city into the fields beyond looking for brigands and troublemakers, looking for anything that might disturb the quiet, looking for an answer.

In the meantime, he listens to the rhythm of hoofed footfalls against the earth and turns his face skyward as the wind rises—watching as it blows back the mantle of cloud overhead, and shows him the stars.


End file.
